Rose MacLeod Part 20

"Of course you couldn't. Only when we really speak with our lips, we must tell each other the truth. If we don't, we shall jar things. Then the other voices will stop."

When she spoke her words had a note of pain, mysteriously disproportioned, he thought, to the warning he had given.

"I don't think I have told you what wasn't true," she faltered. Life had gone out of her.

The tenderest comforting seemed to him too harsh for such pathetic sorrow. But he clung to his lighter, safer mood.

"We've simply got to tell each other the truth. When we don't, it's like the clanging of ten thousand bells. Of course that drowns the other voices. So when I ask you if you are one of the charmers, you mustn't ask what I mean. You must answer."

She began to laugh. His heart rejoiced at it.

"Yes," she owned gleefully. "Yes, I am."

"That's a good lady. You're very beautiful, too, aren't you?"

"Yes," she corroborated. "Oh, I'd swear to anything!"

"If it's true," he corrected her. "What are your accomplishments, missy?

Do you play the piano?"

For his life, Osmond could not have told why he addressed her as he did, or how he got the words. Some strange self seemed to have sprung up in him, a self that had a language he had not learned from books nor used to woman. The new self grew rapidly. He felt it wax within him. It was loquacious, too. It seemed to have more to say than there would be time for in a million years; but he gave it head.

"I play a little," said Rose. She was meeting him joyously. "I sing, too."

"Yes, you sing. I guessed that. Let me hear you."

At once she folded her hands on her knees and sang like a child in heaven, with the art that is simplicity. She sang "Nous n'irons plus au bois," and Osmond felt his heart choking with the melancholy of it. His own voice trembled when he said,--

"You must not sing that often. It's too sad."

"Are we never to be sad?" She asked it in a quick tone full of eager confidence, as if whatever he told her was bound to come to pa.s.s.

"Not when we are together."

Premonition chilled him there. Why should they ever be together again?

Why was it not possible that this was his one night, the first and the last? So if it was to be the last, he would taste every minute of it, and make it his to keep.

"Well," he said consideringly, "so you are a charmer. You can charm a bird off a bush. That would be one of the first tricks."

She answered, in what he saw was real delight,--

"I can try. Want me to?"

"No, no. You can't tell what will become of the bird--in the end."

His voice sounded to her ineffably sad. Eager words rose again to her lips, and again she held them back, even against the glamour of that light and air.

"You broke your promise to me," she adventured presently.

"What promise?"

"You said you would come to the house."

"I said I might." He spoke with an embracing tenderness, as if to a child. She fancied he was smiling at her through the dusk. "Besides," he continued, "I shan't come to see you there, anyway; I have decided that."

"Why not?"

"This is better."

"This?"

"This tree."

It seemed quite just and natural that she should meet him there. Why should she disclaim it?

"But you won't go to the house to see your grandmother?"

"Oh, I see grannie. She wakes before day. We have a little talk every morning while you're asleep. The last time"--he stopped.

"Well!" she urged him.

"The last time I pa.s.sed your door I heard your step inside. When I went out at the front door, I heard you on the stairs." It had apparently enormous significance to him. "The next morning I came earlier," said Osmond, in a low tone, "but I dropped a handful of rose leaves at your sill."

"I saw them--scattered rose leaves."

"For you to step on."

There was a moment's silence.

"But I didn't," she said. "I didn't step on them."

"What did you do?"

"I gathered them up very carefully in my handkerchief and left them in my bureau drawer."

"Now, why"--he spoke curiously--"why did you do that?"

"I hate to throw away flowers. They are precious to me."

There was silence again, and then he said reprovingly,--

"No, you mustn't do that."

"Do what?"

"You mustn't get up earlier to catch me scattering my rose leaves. That wouldn't be fair."

"That was what I was thinking." She mused a moment. "No, I suppose it wouldn't be fair."